Aaron Murray, maybe to establish a little pundit cred, has picked Mississippi State, albeit reluctantly, to win tomorrow. He’s going to be on the field for the game, which ought to be somewhat awkward, but the hilarious part is that some of his former teammates are giving him crap about it.
Daily Archives: September 22, 2017
If MSU brings a Simmons to the fight…
Georgia brings a Carter and Bellamy.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
Today, in stat of the day
Care to guess which SEC team has allowed the fewest quarterback pressures?
Yeah, me, too.
Also, consider that Arkansas and Florida have only played two games this season. Yikes.
Filed under SEC Football, Stats Geek!
“I don’t quite understand how that happens.”
Pitt’s Pat Narduzzi knows when you’re playing Georgia Tech, it’s never too early to start working the refs.
Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi isn’t the first coach to raise an issue with Georgia Tech’s blocking scheme, but he is the latest. On his radio show Wednesday, Narduzzi said that Tech’s offensive line gets away with chop blocking.
“They do a lot of high-lowing,” Narduzzi said. “It’s dangerous football, I can tell you that. You watch inside, if you watch our nose tackle, there’s times when a center is kind of hitting him up high and there’s a guy coming in from the other side, which is really illegal, but they never call it. I don’t quite understand how that happens.”
Narduzzi was describing a chop block, an illegal maneuver in which two players simultaneously block one opposing player, one at thigh level or lower and the other above it. It is not to be confused with a cut block, in which a player blocks a defender below the waist. It is a legal block with certain limitations on where and when it can be thrown.
Narduzzi also said that wide receiver Ricky Jeune pushes off when catching passes.
“He’s a big, 6-foot-3, 210-pound wideout that, he’ll run down the field, he’ll push off you, Billy, and he’ll go up and catch it,” Narduzzi told show host Bill Hillgrove. “Imagine that.”
Sarcasm will get you nowhere, man. Which is kind of a shame.
Filed under Georgia Tech Football
Doing it for the mediocrities
Nick Saban wants you to know he’s really, truly interested in a home-and-home series against a P5 opponent. There’s just one little problem.
“I’ve been out there talking about how we should have to play all Power 5 conferences in all 12 games,” Saban said. “And I know there’s a lot of opposition to that. The biggest opposition is the way you qualify for a bowl game. Everybody wants to win six games. So, they win six games, they get to go to a bowl game. Well, if I could play four teams that I know I could beat that nobody really cares about watching, then I could qualify for a bowl game.
“Well, my answer to that would be: Why don’t we do it like they do basketball? They pick 64 teams or 68 teams or whatever it is for the basketball tournament based on, not their record necessarily, but strength of schedule and all that type of stuff, so you put the best teams however many there are, kind of like we do the top-12 now. And then it wouldn’t be as big an issue to try to win six games, but it would be more about who you play, strength of schedule, be much better for the fans.”
Nick Saban, friend of the six-game winner. The man sure knows how to work the angles, don’t he?
Filed under Nick Saban Rules
Taking on Todd
I’ve already reminded you that the last time a Georgia team faced a Todd Grantham defense, it had its way with it. Nick Chubb rushed for 266 yards (an 8-yard per carry clip) as Georgia scored 37 points in a game when the offensive reins got turned over to Brice Ramsey before the end of the first half.
Which got me to thinking about something else. How has the much-maligned Jim Chaney done facing off against Grantham? Some of you may want to wipe those sneers off your faces before you continuing reading this post. Turns out they’ve met twice and Chaney’s more than held his own.
Game one: Georgia vs. Tennessee, 2012. Remember that one? The Dawgs raced out to a 27-10 lead early in the second quarter, only to fuel a UT comeback with turnovers. The Vols wound up with almost 500 yards of offense on the day, generated more first downs than Georgia and won the time of possession battle.
Game two: Louisville vs. Pittsburgh, 2015. All you need to know on this one is that Nathan Peterman threw four second-quarter touchdowns en route to the Pitt upset. 476 yards of offense, more first downs than a Bobby Petrino offense managed and a huge TOP advantage should sound familiar if you read the previous paragraph.
Yes, it’s a small sample size and past performance is no guarantee of future results. I get all that. Still, Jim Chaney’s got no reason to fear what he’s going up against tomorrow.
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UPDATE: I don’t know where my head is at today. Marc Weiszer reminds me of two other meetings, both of which went more favorably in Grantham’s direction.
- Georgia vs. Tennessee, 2010. A 41-14 rout. Matt Simms was UT’s quarterback and he sucked. UT had less than 300 yards of offense and turned the ball over three times.
- Georgia vs. Tennessee, 2011. It wasn’t a rout, but it was much the same story for Tennessee’s offense, as the total yardage was again under 300. The Vols didn’t manage a touchdown until the game’s final three minutes.
Not so hot. But then again, those were the SOD years. Maybe Chaney learned something then.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
You can’t put a price tag on success.
So you’ve got this study…
Which team is the most valuable?
That would be Ohio State, which has surged to a $1.5 billion valuation, according to an analysis by Ryan Brewer, an associate professor of finance at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus. That’s a 59.6% increase in value for a program that was already worth the most nationally according to the study, which analyzes what each team would be worth on the open market if sold like a professional sports franchise…
The study broke down each program’s most recently available revenues and expenses, from 2016, making cash-flow adjustments, risk assessments and growth projections. Across the sport, the value of Football Bowl Subdivision teams spiked by 26% over the 2015 numbers, the product of cash flows that rose 24% and revenues that grew by 19%.
Shockingly, no mention is made of reserve funds, which may explain why Georgia is only eighth on that list. Still, that beats the annual showing of the school in the Directors’ Cup, which is as good an indication of B-M’s priorities as anything.
Filed under Georgia Football
When you’ve got a lot more money than sense
Man, when’s the last time you heard a former athletic director talk like this?
ThatContract was signed on his watch, so “it’s his fault.”
No contract in college football these days has generated as much scrutiny and criticism as the one handed to Kevin Sumlin when Eric Hyman was Texas A&M’s athletic director.
In December 2013, Sumlin signed a six-year, $30-million extension. Guaranteed…
Was ThatContract Hyman’s decision?
“No. I had nothing to do with it,” Hyman told me in an interview on Wednesday morning at a Starbucks near his home in Fort Worth.
“I have done this job a long time and I don’t blame Kevin Sumlin. If someone is going to give you $5 million a year for six years, it would have been stupid of him to turn it down,” Hyman said. “But the contract was given to me, and it was ‘This is what we are going to do.’ I looked at myself and I was stunned.
“I had no say so over it. I’ve been doing this job for a long time. I had worked with Steve Spurrier for years, and he was paid a heck of a lot less than Coach Sumlin. And he won national championships after conference championships. And then you are making this commitment to a person, and again I don’t blame Kevin, that’s never won a conference championship.
“When the original contract was given to me, if Kevin were to leave the next day there was no buyout provision.”
Is this a case of an ex-athletic director covering his behind with revisionist history? On this one, no.
Given Hyman’s history of how he handled coaches and costs plus A&M’s history of an “active board,” his explanation is plausible.
But why would A&M give Sumlin such a deal when there was no need?
“Because people didn’t know what they were doing,” Hyman said.
In a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, that’s today’s SEC.
Filed under It's Just Bidness, SEC Football
This is what happens when your defense is on drugs.
The hardest part of analyzing what happened in Starkville last Saturday is figuring out how much of the result should be attributed to Mississippi State’s offensive excellence and now much to LSU’s defensive ineptitude. I’m still not ready to render a final assessment in that regard, but, damn, the Tigers’ defense couldn’t set the edge to save its life in that game.
If Tucker’s troops can’t do any better than that, we can all leave early in the second half.
Filed under SEC Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Get The Picture 